The Wright Stuff
October 14th, 2008 Comment on this article
Visionaries are not always thinking about the future as they leave the past behind. Sometimes, they are just looking to make a change.
That was Glens Falls Records Management Tech/City Historian Wayne Wright 11 years ago. When he thumbed through a Laserfiche brochure back then, he was thinking about the bulky bound volumes of birth, death and marriage certificates the City Clerk’s office staff wrestled with on top of the copier thirty to forty times each day. A decade later Laserfiche is helping most every aspect of Glens Falls government run more efficiently, largely through the single-minded effort of an administrator who just wanted to make a change.
“Wayne has been the man all along,” says Glens Falls City Clerk Robert Curtis. “Without him, probably
none of this work would have been done. Laserfiche has truly been a wonderful asset to this office, and Wayne has been the point man all along. Whether it’s securing the funding or keeping the database updated, Wayne is the one that puts it all together.”
Glens Falls is a city of about 15,000 residents located in Upstate New York’s hardscrabble Lower Adirondack Region, an area not known for investing in novel government technology. Still, when the city’s microfilm vendor showed Wright that Laserfiche brochure, he couldn’t help but think about that old copier.
“We were probably printing out about 1,200 certificates each month,” Wright says. “Every day you had to drag out those books, find the record, flip the books over, cram them onto the copier glass, and then hope you got a shot you could actually use. It got to where I hated doing it.”
So, Wright applied for—and was rejected for—a grant from the New York State Archives. At that time, the State Archives was concerned about the long-term prospects of what was still a novel technology. When the grant was turned down, Wright turned to the City’s Common Council and, with the City Clerk’s blessing, the Council approved a three-year lease-to-own purchase plan for a Laserfiche software license, scanner and computer.
With the city’s commitment to document imaging backing him, Wright applied for another Archives grant, only this time he specified the money was to be used only for back-scanning archived records. With a $12,800 state grant in hand, Glens Falls began scanning its vital records—and Wright began getting less of a workout at work.
A vendor was hired to do the back-scanning, leaving Wright free to begin creating the city’s first electronic historic archive. This was evening and weekend work for which Wright, as city historian, was paid a stipend augmented only by his love for the project. He traveled from city businesses to homes to government record rooms pulling out, copying and scanning documents, postcards, building plans and proclamations.
As he was reconstructing the city’s past, Wright was also building its future as one of the Northeast’s leading small cities in electronic document management storage, according to Bruce Cadman, regional sales representative for Rochester, NY-based, Laserfiche reseller General Code.
“Wayne has done an incredible job getting all sorts of documents into Laserfiche,” Cadman says. “He made it his personal mission to make a searchable database that can be much more easily accessed by everyone in City Hall.”
As Wright’s co-workers were getting to know Laserfiche better, so were the folks at the State Archives’ grant office. Glens Falls was awarded a $22,000 grant for its Laserfiche project a few years after the first, followed by a third grant for $32,000 and a fourth for $43,000.
Along the way, the city’s computer has been upgraded three times, a server was installed to store scanned images and the first scanner was replaced with a smaller and faster color unit. Glens Falls also upgraded from Laserfiche 5 to Laserfiche 7, which helped Wright to expand his database to incorporate other City Hall departments, according to General Code tech support engineer Brian Hoody.
Laserfiche streamlined the city’s scanning and storing operations, so Wright was able to expand the system’s scope. He used grant funding to start scanning city court indexes, personnel, cemetery and public works department documents, winning him friends outside the clerk’s office, nowhere more than in the building department where, again with the help of State Archives grants, Glens Falls has been aggressively scanning both new and old building plans.
It’s the latter that can be particularly useful to residents renovating an older home, building inspector John Ward says. Residents can even get copies of the municipal code and master plan on compact disc. Now, when residents want copies from the building department, Ward sends them over to see Wright, who pulls them out of Laserfiche within minutes, instead of hours.
“When Wayne showed me what he wanted to do with this system I thought it was great,” says Ward. “It’s been very, very helpful particularly with all the older buildings we have in Glens Falls.”
As the database has expanded, so has its sophistication. Laserfiche Snapshot instantly stores Microsoft Word files and other internal documents in Laserfiche. And scanned images are exported to the city’s microfilm vendor, who creates permanent microfilm copies of the records using a Kodak Archive Writer.
The last State Archives grant written by Wright was to scan records which had been microfilmed years before. The original records were destroyed after they were filmed, so using the film was the only way to add them to the Laserfiche database. Through the help of then Mayor LeRoy Akins, Jr., the funding was used to purchase a Canon microfilm scanner and pay two temporary employees to run the machine. This project was a great success and the City plans to share the microfilm scanner with other local governments when possible.
When Wright dons his City Historian hat, he has the ability to bring the Laserfiche historic records archive with him on CD. Doing field research with Laserfiche, Wright says, enables him to more easily separate the historic documents he already has from those he wants to add to the archive.
Still, there is much more Laserfiche could be doing for the city. The city bought Laserfiche Quick Fields but Wright still indexes documents individually after they are scanned. Hoody plans to work with Wright to install Quick Fields and make Wright’s job even more manageable.
Then there are Agenda Manager, Workflow, WebLink and Web Access, which are all firmly on Wright’s list of possible purchases. Mayor Akins died in August 2008 from cancer and council-wide elections are also slated for next year, so such purchases will likely be deferred, Curtis says.
Then there’s always the matter of finding the money, but that’s where Wright’s work as a State Archives grants writer comes in. Over the past few years, the granting agency has seen more and more benefits in funding electronic document management systems for small communities like Glens Falls, according to State Archives Director of Government Records Services Geof Huth.
“There have been plenty of grants submitted for Laserfiche, because it’s fairly popular with medium-sized governments,” Huth says. “The reason the State Archives is awarding more imaging grants is that more people are interested in document management—and that’s because of the work of people like Wayne.”
Tags: Local Government, microfilm, records management, ROI